But my parents don’t seem to heed this supplication.
My father and mother kiss.
She is still on her knees.
It must be an ancestral posture.
On her knees in the sand that grows cooler minute by minute.
We share in a moment of pleasant solitude (placentic, I mean). How much time between each apocalyptic tremor in Mamma Mia’s belly? Nothing moves and I take advantage of the free time to count time and tell myself: I still haven’t been born yet I already feel as if my soul were ancient. I still haven’t been born yet I already fear that I’m going to act again the way my ancestors acted. Glory and ambition. Love and liberty. Violence. A land of sad men and happy children: how many children are born and die and are reborn with me?
I know that this is the calm before the storm. I know it.
Ayayay, here comes the earthquake again, I knew it, I knew it, you loved me, you loved me, Dad! Mom! Reader! Tell me, all of you! What’s happening to me? Am I going? How I grab on to my destiny now that the racket’s starting up again, my mother’s commotions, her belly as agitated as the deepest tide of the deepest part of the ocean over which the Lost Boy and the Orphan Huerta are urging us to flee: I repeat to myself like a prayer: my destiny is defined by the genes of my father and mother—I am unique—I am the product of a conjunction of genes that had never combined before in the same way—it’s possible that the genetic combination that fell to me will make me happy—it’s possible it will make me unhappy—but I’ll never know it unless I’m born, and what I’m feeling as my mother’s contractions grow more frequent is that I’m going to be thrown out of my home sweet home, once again to wander, but if the first exit of little Christopher took place during pleasure, this one—I can smell it—will take place amid pain; why, my God, why conceived in pleasure and born in strife? My fear is yellow like the faces from Pacífica: am I going to be born? or am I actually going to die? I have aged irremediably in my mother’s belly, yes, what they call being born is a deception, I am going to die a little old man; nobody gets any more time than nine months, we all die at nine months of age; the rest is death because it is oblivion (how you tremble, holy little Mother, calm down, for heaven’s sake: give your little Christopher some peace! Not so hard, Mom, I feel like a marble made of blood rolling down a tunnel of smoke! Are you casting me out into the world? And suppose the world also only lasts nine months, what then? Mommy, Mommy, holy God, Daddy, Dada, Dada …). I’m forgetting everything I knew, the light is going out, here inside I knew everything, genes and Hegels, Hegelatines, my ancestors lived nine months keeping me company, my telephone book’s full of lawyers, and more lawyers, shysters, rhetoricians, yakkers, ambulance chasers, prosecutors and prostitutors, hearings and seeings, syndicates and cynicates, tried and retried, executors and executioners, houses of detention and houses of correction: well, correct me if you can, let’s see you correct the world.
What’s happening, from the lunar center of my mother I hear them, smell them, oh Granny: it’s the coyotes of Acapulco, have they come back to be present at my entry into life? into death? I smell their wet fur, their reddish eyes penetrate my mother’s transparent belly, they could sink their sharp fangs between my fed navel and her exhausted navel: the coyotes form a circle around us, my father, my mother, and me, separating us from the Lost Boy and Orphan Huerta, who urge us: Soon? There’s no time left! Choose: Pacífica or Mexico?
Or Mexico: will I be born here? You know where? Will I leave this country? Owing a thousand dollars, dead or alive! Will I be led to the D.F.? To breathe from birth eleven thousand tons of sulphur, lead, and carbon monoxide every day? To join a half million annual births—anal birds, antic words? To join a quarter of a million kids who die of asphyxia and infection each year? To shit, to add my shit to that of millions of dogs, cats, mice, horses, bats, unicorns, eagles, serpents, plumed coyotes? To swallow thirty thousand tons of garbage per day? To join the vultures that devour the rot: blessed art thou, Our Lady Tlazoltéotl, first star of the eternal night and of the invisible day, you who cleanse by devouring and then dirty it all in order to have something to clean; lady, can you compete with seven million automobiles, five million bureaucrats, thirty million pissers, shifters, eaters, fuckers, sneezers? Am I going out into that country? So that they can tell me that thanks to oil we’re in good shape? That from now on we have nothing to worry about, just to administer our wealth? That I’ll have my refrigerator even though I may not have electricity, and my Walkman so that people can be jealous when I walk the streets that are buried in garbage and fires?
READERS, RESOLVE MY DILEMMA:
Is it worth it to be born in Mexico in 1992?
Please! I’m forgetting everything! With each maternal shake something else slips out of my memory, I’m talking to my ancestors to see if they remember, but now they, too, have slipped away and with them everything I knew, now I won’t know anything, goo, be-a-ba here comes the ahhhhh: the fire above my little head went out, and outside I can hear the ubiquitous loudspeakers that travel the streets and plazas of my Sweet Fatherland, announcing that the celebration has been postponed, presidential decree / speech by Mamadoc and her / Columbus was colonial / there is nothing to celebrate the little Christophers are finished / Mexican time is postponable time, postponable, postponable: everything’s happening tomorrow, not today, what do you say? All this happened tomorrow! (My mother trembles even more, now she howls like the coyotes that surround us.) Will my birth be postponed? So, after all that, I won’t be born? Am I being given the right not to be born? Can I choose? Can I perhaps stay here forever in my soft salon, swimming in my Olympic pool, living in ease on the blood, the pâté, and the mucus of Madonna Angelica? Aaaaay here comes the aaaaaah: she is screaming in pain, the killer quake of ’85 is being reproduced in its entirety in my mother’s city, on uterus avenue (labyrinth of solitude! Luther’s Expressway!), and I curse my mommy,
MOTHER
NAME WHERE BIOLOGY ACQUIRES A SOUL!
WHERE NATURE BECOMES TRANSCENDENT!
AND WHERE SEX BECOMES HISTORY!
Can you hear me, Mom? Why don’t you answer me? You, too, are forgetting—are you forgetting me? I kick I dive I bend like a reed, I hear, ever more faintly, your voice which during nine months accompanied me, soothed me, sang to me, celebrated me, what’s happening to me, Mommy? History’s happening to me, the past is happening to me, the nation is happening to me and the narration of the nation is happening to me, the earth is happening to pass me toward you who lead me, I hear you say it, weakly now, the gas is passing out of me, my memory and my desire are passing out of me, my imagination and my language, love and envy are passing out of me, resentment and celebration are passing out of me, narrowness and symbols, analogies and differences all passing out of me, tacos, eggplant parmigiana (Anna? Anna, like manna, banana, banana split? That’s it!), I’m heading for the earth, Mother, on this beach you received me and on it you are going to toss me, just as Uncle Homero was tossed, flying, naked, and spraying the world with blood and shit to celebrate my arrival: do you know what you are doing when you expel me into the world, Mother? Have you taken account of your responsibility and my own? You expel me to earth knowing that I am going to violate it, just as you, and my father and Homero Fagoaga and a pair of blind Indians with wooden hoes and Don Ulises López armed with lawsuits and checkbooks and bonds without bonds: will the very earth that we violate receive us, will you tell me, you and my father? We kill the earth in order to be able to live, and then we expect the earth to forgive us, absolve us of death even though we kill it? I’m being thrown, Pop and Mom, into a world where there is no possible reconciliation: we cannot be at one with the exploited earth, she gives us fewer punishments (death) than we give to her (violence): now I take revenge on you, world, to take out my portion of violence on you, violence on nature, violence on men, violence on myself: I am going to that destiny, beyond the ephemeral idiocies of smog, debt, the PRI, our national symbols, that’s
what I’m coming into, taking revenge on myself: to exploit the world from the moment I walk on it and to spend my life trying to expiate the guilt of my first exploitation, which was to suck your milk, which was to spit in a stream, which was to eat a jar of pureed Paschal Lamb sacrificed for me: am I arriving just to share this guilt? Can I do something to redeem it? Can I love a woman, write a book, free a people? Not even that, not even that: I’ll do it all, gentle Readers, except allow the good earth to speak for itself, to express itself directly, not through my song or my curse, that I will not permit because I think (that’s his father talking, you say) that art or politics or science (that comes from his grandparents!) is a sufficient compensation for our crime; that’s why I go resigned to debt, oh Readers, to the PRI, to the smog, and to Mamadoc, because an instant before leaving my mother’s womb I know (and I will forget it!) that neither I nor any other child about to be born, here or anywhere, could stand being born in a perfect world, a just world: it would horrify us, deprive us of all our pretexts, we need, oh Lord, oh Reader, oh Pro-Gen-I-Tors, an unjust world in order to dream about changing it, by ourselves, into a better world: the earth smiles before paying us, mercifully, with death …
I ask myself: I ask you: I ask all of you:
Will I have the right, at least, to intimacy with the world?
I do not have (I don’t have, we don’t have) time to answer; the contractions are more and more frequent; my father embraces my mother; they kiss; the two of them are kneeling on the beach, on their knees in the sand that grows colder by the minute, and their fingers are buried in whatever is left of the heat. Now my father takes her hand. He guides her finger over the sand. Their fingers write:
It is burning ice, frozen fire,
a wound that pains yet is unfelt
a dreamed-of good, a present ill
a brief rest which is no rest.
A wave breaks and washes away the poem—by whom? just written on the wet sand:… what is the name of that poem?
The wave takes away something else: I tremble as I hear that poem my father recites aloud, where have I heard it before? where? by God, before I knew everything, I heard that poem before. Now the fire over my head is going out, I knew who wrote it before, what its title was, now even the verses are disappearing just as lifelines disappear when the dead grow old: am I growing old, am I dying, am I forever leaving behind my ancestors, my memory, and my future imagining here inside as well? What do I hold on to, my God? I invoke you, see? I shall not end my poor unborn novel without directing a prayer to you, without recognizing you (just in case), but I’ll be brief: I’ll leave you this spot, you will decide whether to occupy it or not!
* * *
I’ll be brief because now events are starting to rush ahead, Readers, and I am the victim of the blessed simultaneity that frees us from fearful symmetry, but both, my last (or penultimate) memory tells me, are lies, nothing is simultaneous and nothing is symmetrical; at least, then, nothing is linear, thank God all of us are circular or spiral observers, it’s our privilege, yours and mine, Reader, here on this beach at midnight at the edge of the sea of waves, one chained to the next where float the galleons of Manila and China, which have come to bring me to the next Utopia.
—Pacífica—
Remember with me that portrait in the house of bright colors, the young Werner Heisenberg, dressed as a mountain climber, blond and smiling, telling us by way of farewell that the observer introduces instability in the system because he cannot separate himself from one point of view and therefore the observer and his point of view are part of the system and therefore there are no ideal systems because there are as many points of view as there are observers and each one sees something different: truth is partial because consciousness is partial: there is no universality except relativity, the world is unfinished because the men and women who observe it still have not finished, and truth, unexhausted, fugitive, in perpetual motion, is only the truth that takes all arbitrary positions into account and all the relative movements of each individual on this earth to which I am vertically heading, far from any lamps above my noggin: by god, Readers! it’s my grandparents, the ones that created the Inconsumable Taco, who are telling me all this, I don’t know if through the chain of my genes or by means of a sonar device in the shape of a hanging gourd that shines black from the highest mast on the China galleon, and that this is the conjuncture: on one side, the Lost Boys urge us one last time, are you coming or not? On the other side, I try to hold on to whatever I can, I stretch out my arms in my mother’s convulsed belly, under a downpour of coagulations, my holy little hands hit a cellophane wrapper, they tear it, and they seek, in the way cartilage follows after bone, in the way little feet seek water to splash around in, that’s how my hands seek out the fraternal twin: the dizzygothic twin, born from the other egg fertilized at the same time as I was, I seek him with my blind little fingers, my sweet little fingers that find another present wrapped in cellophane, they tear it open, they sniff the other being in the way the coyotes know how to smell and distinguish the differing scents of the twins: I touch those neighboring little fingers even if they are those of another and I know whose they are: Baby Ba! She was here all the while! She was here and I didn’t know it! Gestating with me! I am not alone! The girl was gestated with the same semen and the same egg that I was! The woman appeared at the same time as I did! Christine appeared with Christopher! I am not alone: I never was, Electra! I quickly think before I forget everything: I see a powerful city, a big-shouldered city, windy, early snow, the hut of a mute Indian woman, a grandmother who didn’t learn English and who forgot Spanish, receiving into her hands another child who appears between the dark and bloody legs of a blind woman, the blind father holds the woman’s head to make her comfortable, the blind boy is being born in Chicago, my fellow, my brother, he frozen and me hot! I who stretch out my fingers and tell Baby Ba my fraternal twin, I no longer have to choose, girl, of course I could see you, come on, come on, let’s go out together, you are my supreme reason for leaving, repeat that with me, we need each other, I cannot see half of the world without you, Baby Ba, nor can you without me, let’s go out to answer the world, to be responsible in the face of reality, stretch out your little hand and touch mine, please, repeat with me the last thing I say to you:
I tell you this: with the same facility that we leave behind the achievements and the ruins. Everything builds and feeds the future, success as well as failure. Everything, therefore, will be ruins. Except the present, girl. Except the present instant in which we were chosen to remember the past and desire the future. Memory and desire, girl. Desire and memory, goo, dada, ma, heeeeere comes the aaaaaaaah, clown begins with c, Baby, we’re together, play with me, let’s be playmates on earth, don’t be afraid anymore, Baby Ba, hold my little hand, I’m here with you, don’t you see, Baby, play with me, play sea serpent, booboo, agoo, dada, mama, papa …
* * *
Angel Palomar refused with a shake of his head: “We’re not going with you.”
I think my father feels that in this moment he is a desperate apparition.
* * *
Alone again! What an absolute solitude. Only my mother’s halo shines intensely. Egg left with the Lost Boy and the Orphan Huerta. We stayed behind. The caravels from the Orient went out to sea, foggy, radiant, their red sails unfurled on the masts, Chinese characters painted on them. Their three masts piercing the deck like stakes made of gold, heading out to sea, far from the dying beach, far from the turbid fever of El Niño and the mortal whiteness of the dolphins and the red and gray circle of coyotes, far from the poem erased by the white tongue of the sea, far away, the caravels shine far away on an ocean where the dolphins live again their pleasurable time, their perpetual leaping and diving in the sea, from the surface to the bottom and from the bottom to the surface, as regular as a clock, as pragmatic as an anchor, as serene as a plumb line, from the bottom to the surface and from the surface to the bottom, eternally, until they di
e. They have no other fun.
* * *
The distant sea, the entire sea, murmured my father, watching the ships from Pacífica sail away without them, the water revived with a puff of air printed on smoke.
* * *
A country of sad men and happy children.
* * *
A child is being born just as October 12, 1992, is born, on the beach at Acapulco. He comes into the world holding the hand of a little girl whose eyes are closed. The boy has his eyes wide open, as if his eyelids had never formed. He looks fixedly at the earth that awaits him. The boy swims toward the land, softly, carrying the girl with him. He emerges from the belly of his mother as if he were crossing the pacific sea, carrying the girl on his shoulders, saving her from death by water. The light went out; the fire over their heads went out. The boy comes out. From the sky a swift Angel descends, an Angel with a golden helmet and green spurs, a flaming sword in his hand, an Angel escaped from the Indo-Hispanic altars of opulent hunger, from need overcome by sleep, from the coupling of opposites: body and soul, wakefulness and death, living and sleeping, remembering and desiring, imagining: the happy boy who reaches the sad land carries all this on his lips, he bears the memory of death, white and extinguished, like the flame that went out in his mother’s belly: for a swift, marvelous instant, the boy being born knows that this light of memory, wisdom, and death was an Angel and that this other Angel who flies from the navel of heaven with the sword in his hand is the fraternal enemy of the first: he is the Baroque Angel, with a sword in his hand and quetzal wings, and a serpent doublet, and a golden helmet, the Angel strikes, strikes the lips of the boy being born on the beach: the burning and painful sword strikes his lips and the boy forgets, he forgets everything forgets everything,